Mental health claims are up 161 per cent in a decade, and the code that answers them is already on your desk

Two numbers frame this file. Over the ten years to 2023-24 (preliminary), serious claims for mental health conditions grew 161.1 per cent, from roughly 6,700 to 17,600, while every other nature-of-injury group combined grew about a quarter. And each mental health claim runs long: median time lost of 35.7 working weeks and median compensation of $67,400 (2022-23 reference), nearly five times and more than four times the all-claims medians. Whatever share of your claims book is psychological today, its share of your costs is larger.

What is actually driving the claims

That ordering deserves attention. The public conversation about work and mental health is mostly about workload. The claims data says the biggest single driver is how people treat each other, which is a management system problem, and precisely the territory the code was written for. The same release shows the burden is not evenly carried: mental health conditions are 17.2 per cent of women's serious claims against 8.2 per cent of men's, the largest gender gap of any injury category.

The 14 hazards the code expects you to have looked for

The code defines a psychosocial hazard as one arising from the design or management of work, the working environment, plant, or workplace interactions and behaviours, and names fourteen: job demands; low job control; poor support; lack of role clarity; poor organisational change management; inadequate reward and recognition; poor organisational justice; traumatic events or material; remote or isolated work; poor physical environment; violence and aggression; bullying; harassment including sexual harassment; and conflict or poor workplace relationships. The list is the audit: a risk register that contains "stress" as one line has not engaged with the instrument. The duties attached are the ordinary ones, identify, eliminate or minimise so far as reasonably practicable, maintain and review, under the WHS Regulations' psychosocial provisions.

The six things an officer personally must do

The underused part of the code is its officer due diligence list, which is the checklist a regulator, or a prosecutor, would measure a director against:

1. Acquire and keep up to date knowledge of psychosocial work health and safety matters.
2. Understand the nature of the business's operations and the hazards and risks involved.
3. Ensure the PCBU has, and uses, appropriate resources and processes to manage psychosocial risks.
4. Ensure the PCBU has processes for receiving and considering information about incidents, hazards and risks, and responding in a timely way.
5. Ensure processes for complying with duties and obligations exist and are implemented.
6. Verify that those resources and processes are actually performing.

Item four is where most organisations quietly fail: the code flags that workers are often hesitant to raise psychosocial hazards for privacy reasons and recommends anonymous reporting channels as a control, naming groups more likely to experience sexual harassment, including women, young workers, culturally and linguistically diverse workers, LGBTIQA+ workers and workers with disability, who should be given genuine opportunities to participate in consultation.

This is no longer a specialist corner of the law

The clearest sign is where the language keeps turning up. The November 2024 edition of the Construction Work code lists psychosocial risks among the eleven regulation-level topics construction PCBUs must manage, alongside falls and electrical work. The July 2025 healthcare and social assistance code, covered in our aged care story, carries a near-identical officer due diligence list. And the national claims trend above is the reason regulators keep saying psychosocial enforcement is where inspection effort is heading. A duty holder who wants one practical starting point should read the code's Figure 1 against their own risk register and count the gaps.